• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1433 0

almost any soft consumer-sector one looks at, the pitch is at once ever more American and ever more global: there is less tension than meets the eye, because global pop culture is American. The two elephantine cola war rivals Coca-Cola and Pepsi are typical.29 Coke remains the global soft-drink leader with more than two-thirds of its 1992 revenues coming from abroad (compared with only 20 percent of Pepsi’s). Yet (in its own unparaphrasable words), “as huge as our world of Coca-Cola is today, it is just a tiny sliver of the world we can create.”30 Coke has had global ambitions for a long time.31 But nowadays an ambitious company cannot simply capture global consumer markets by aping their ideologies and accommodating their tastes: it must also be prepared to create global markets by careful planning and control. The new technologies are more powerful than the old, and Coke has now manufactured its own soft-drink ideology that assimilates the ideals of the Olympics, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Rutgers University into a theme-park ideal existence for Coke drinkers. McWorld’s innovative virtual industries generate virtual need factories (advertising agencies, corporate public relations and communications divisions, business foundations) where emotions are identified and manipulated with images that forge new wants.32

Now thirst cannot be manufactured but taste can. The world’s thirsty can drink water (just as the world’s footloose walkers can wear ordinary old shoes): if they are to drink beverages that earn someone else an income, consumption has to be associated with new “needs,” new tastes, new status. You must drink because it makes you feel (your choice): young, sexy, important, “in,” strong, sporty, smart, with it, cool, hot (as in cool), athletic, right on, part of the world as in we-are-the-world as in we-Americans-are-the-world: in sum, like a winner, like a hero, like a champion, like an American, which is to say, above all, fun-loving (as in blondes have more). The one reason you must not consume soft drinks is to quench your thirst in any decisive way. Water would accomplish that. In fact, if you’re going to buy another soda, the ideal soft drink should give you the feeling your thirst has been quenched while actually leaving you metabolically thirstier after you finish than before you began. Within the right informational nexus, even H2O can be sold for profit, as it is with so-called designer waters like Perrier. And if a potable salted beverage could only be found …

“How long can a company of our scope keep doubling its size?” asks Coca-Cola CEO Roberto C. Goizueta. “Where will the next 10 billion unit cases come from? And the 20 billion after that?”33 Goizueta has an answer, which to him seems obvious. “The fact is,” he observes, “that we are just now seriously entering and developing soft drink markets that account for the majority of the world’s population. These new worlds of opportunity are not only heavily populated, but also culturally and climatically ripe for significant soft drink consumption.” Climatically ripe, that’s pretty obvious: where it is hot, people are thirsty, and if we can only get them off of water But culturally ripe? What can this mean? Coke is anything but disingenuous: in Indonesia (whose Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, Cokes in hand, are featured on the 1992 Annual Report’s cover), “aggressive investment” can defeat local culture and force the nation to follow those “societies that have traditionally consumed beverages like tea” but have been brought to make “the transition to sweeter beverages like Coca-Cola.” Getting people off of water is a matter of economics (water is free), but getting them off of tea entails a cultural campaign. The “decline in tea consumption,” which might for cultural anthropologists signal a foreboding onset of erosion in a dominant local culture, is welcomed as a door ajar for sweet beverage sales. If only every Indonesian could switch from tea to Coke—and from sandals to Nikes and from rice to chicken McNuggets and from saris to Laura Ashley dresses